Papal Army

The Papal Army was the loosely-construed army of volunteers and mercenaries in the service of the Italian Papal States, active from the 8th century until the capture of Rome by Italy in 1870. The Papal States maintained a sizeable military during the Middle Ages, using it to fight against the Holy Roman Empire and its Ghibelline allies. During the 1300s, the Papal States began to employ the services of condottieri, mercenaries who sold their services to the extremely wealthy Catholic Church. These forces would be instrumental to the defense of the Pope during the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, with Cesare Borgia leading the Papal Army on a campaign of conquest that added several new city-states and regions to the Papal States' territories. The Papal Army would defend the Papal States ably until the 1790s, when the French Revolutionary Army invaded Italy and repeatedly slaughtered the Pope's forces. In 1799, the French took Rome, and the Papal States was subjected to French occupation for years. The Papal States ceased to hold much influence in the politics of the Italian peninsula as a result of the French and Austrian occupations of Italy during the 19th century, and the Pope would depend on the Second French Empire to crush a republican movement in Rome in 1849 and to defend the city from Giuseppe Garibaldi's Redshirts. In 1870, when the French troops protecting Rome were sent away to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, the Royal Italian Army conquered Rome, ending the Papal States and its army.